Every Critical Service Needs a Reliability Owner
Shared ownership sounds collaborative, but it often produces unclear decisions. When a critical service has no named reliability owner, operational risks remain visible without becoming actionable. A reliability owner is not the person expected to fix every incident. The role is accountable for ensuring that reliability decisions are made, funded, and followed through. That distinction matters. Accountability should be clear even when implementation is distributed across several teams. Ownership Must Include Decision Rights Assigning a name in a service catalog is not enough. The owner needs authority to influence priorities when reliability work competes with feature delivery. For each critical service, the reliability owner should be able to: Define service-level objectives with product and business partners. Escalate unresolved operational risks. Prioritize work triggered by error budget consumption. Confirm that incident actions have owners and deadlines. Challenge d...